Britain at War Experience

Under another Tooley St railway arch, the Britain at War Experience aims to educate the younger generation about the effect WWII had on daily life, while simultaneously playing on the nostalgia of the war generation. In general it’s a tribute to ordinary people and comes off fairly well – though the rather musty displays make it feel like you’re on a low-budget TV stage-set. You descend by lift to a reproduction of an Underground station fitted with bunks, tea urns, gas masks and even a lending library (as some stations were, for use as air-raid shelters) and then progress through rooms that display wartime newspaper front pages, posters and Ministry of Food ration books. The BBC Radio Studio allows you to hear domestic and international broadcasts by everyone from Winston Churchill and Edward Murrow to Hitler and Lord Haw Haw. The Rainbow Corner is a mock-up of a club frequented by American GIs ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Finally, you emerge amid the wreckage of a shop hit by a bomb during the Blitz, with the smoke still eddying around and the injured – or dead – being carried from the rubble.